People’s public identities used to be partly based on products from a few big brands, which were established over time by aggressive marketing campaigns. The long-tail effect of the internet has brought about a highly fragmented space, where completely unknown producers increase the available product count and compete on equal footing with established players through virtual retailers like Amazon.com, without the traditionally expensive overheads of marketing, salaries, and store costs.

In a world where products are purchased in the privacy of your home, one would think that product-based public identities would lag behind — but this is hardly the case. Social networking sites are adorned with branded applications, which goes a long way to establishing an online persona — typically one of many. Brand loyalty is also extremely strong in the virtual world, where people adopt and speak passionately about big brands such as Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo!.

Technological improvements in storage and connectivity as well as an overall cost reduction have brought about a new senseless aspect to consumerism — best described by the term “devourism”. Music collections, traditionally limited by the bulky storage requirements of jewel cases, are now typically found on pocket-sized devices and collections range in the thousands of songs. Likewise DVDs are now replaced by attractive storage devices that can store ridiculous amounts of movies while taking up no more space than a few stacked DVD boxes.

Will all of the above spell the end for the science of consumer behaviour? The study of the latent and manifest motives behind a mother’s decision to purchase a specific brand of washing powder because the children in the advertisement look so happy with their clean clothes, or a brand of toothpaste because the family are all happy when they brush their teeth together in the morning? Definitely not!

Maslow’s classification of human needs as physiological, safety, love/belonging, esteem, and self-actualisation are still applicable in this changing online world, implying that although the mechanisms through which we consume might be changing radically, the underlying reasons why we consume do not.

Thankfully many retailers have taken to the internet to try to get a share of the success of sites like Amazon.com and in the process brought armchair-shopping nirvana to us, the masses.

Security is always a concern when buying online. Luckily most internet browsers, such as Firefox and Internet Explorer, have made big strides to make clients more aware of our security or suspicious activity for online transactions. We’ve all seen that little lock appearing in a browser that allows you to view the details of the security certificate for the site to which you’re about to give money.

Unfortunately people don’t always pay attention to that little lock, or — far more problematic — the lack thereof before they enter their credit-card details. Thankfully certain laws prevent online shopping sites to store credit-card details, but enforcing this is always going to be problematic and, quite frankly, you never know when a disgruntled employee will dump the entire credit-card database and sell it on the internet.

So how can you prevent your credit-card details from falling in the wrong hands? Over and above the obvious ways, you actually can’t. You’ll never be able to control all those external factors, but you can control what they get access to.

Most of us already have multiple credit cards, and if you don’t, then choose the flavour of the day and get yourself a credit card from your friendly bank. They’ll gladly give you one. Firstly set the credit limit to zero on this card. I know it feels great when the bank hands you a card with R20 000 credit on it, but you don’t want to be liable for that when some wannabe hacker gets his hands on it. Secondly, only transfer enough money to that account to pay for the purchases you are about to make, no more.

And there you go, easy as that. By following this straightforward approach and always using that one specific card for all your online spending, you’ll have a bit more peace of mind regarding the security of your online spending habits, rather than being forced into an online retail hiatus because of the ridiculous amounts of online credit-card fraud.

People tend to forget, though — or are just not aware — of the fact that these great things don’t just happen. There’s plenty of hardware and infrastructure underneath all these life-changing services that need to be configured, maintained and kept up and running 24×7×365.

I love technology, I love programming computers and I love making hardware improve people’s lives, as that is ultimately what it was designed for, but on certain days, technology seems to have it in for you. You know those days when you get to work, and your PC won’t even start up, nothing seems to work, and no matter what you do it seems just to get worse and worse?

I had one of those days today. It resulted in a brand-new installation, and an overall zero productivity rating for the day, but I did end up with a brand-spanking-new look and feel to my trusted old laptop, which will ultimately support me without flaw or complaint for the next three months or so before it requires a bit of tender love and care again. A small price to pay for the incessant playing, tweaking and tuning that comes with opening the “hood” of your computer — something I invariably do from time to time.

Unfortunately the reality is that these machines still require effort and raw man hours to stay up and running. Even without the tuning and playing it demands downtime to align the technological planets. In many ways I guess this compares with the regular service intervals of a car or a motorcycle, with which these machines unfortunately cannot go without, but given all the great technological advancements we’ve made, is it really that much to ask to have another small piece of technology to enable us to reduce the amount of pain it takes to get up and running when these “service intervals” occur?

The concept is not a new one, though. As a kid I remember reading about people from distant countries looking for pen pals in our local magazines, to write them and share stories about your specific part of the world. I guess the internet has enabled pen pals to fast-track the process and share tons more info in a few keystrokes and mouse clicks than the measly few photos and words you could send in an envelope across the continental divide in a matter of weeks.

People seem to trust their online pen pals rather naively as well. In a recent study a software security firm set up a Facebook profile and sent out 200 random friend requests, to see how many people would respond, and how much identity information people were willing to share.

Just less than half the requests responded, with the majority willingly giving their email addresses, complete date of birth, education or workplace details as well their current addresses. A notable minority also gave out their phone numbers and instant-messaging screen names.

Clearly this is enough information for a person intending to commit identity fraud, and with a bit of social engineering one should be able to extract even more information to fake an identity successfully to the point where one can successfully commit fraud.

Fortunately social sites are evolving technologically along with the threats, and they realise the value of their user base and the protection and security that their users require to continue to use their sites. Have a decent browse around the site the next time before you enter your info, a bit of common sense might just go a long way to preventing some really nasty surprises down the line.

The truth is that the rat race is bad for all of us. It’s not necessarily just the negative aspect of the innate materialism fuelled by the advertising industry and the money makers behind it who bring us the status-laden images of fast cars and beautiful women in designer clothes drinking designer drinks, but physically and mentally it takes a lot out of us. As the old adage goes, when all is left and gone, all you have left is your health.

Health-club membership must be on an all-time high in South Africa given the number of gyms popping up, and in some cases we even have two competing franchises in the same shopping complex, clearly an indicator of a booming industry.

Technological advances have luckily come a long way in helping us make life a bit more bearable. Many companies have embraced ADSL as an enabler to allow people to work from home, and a whole spat of productivity-enhancing collaboration tools have emerged to make the globe an even smaller village yet.

Management is still struggling to understand the productivity benefits of these new solutions, but as companies start outsourcing more and more work to offshore companies to overcome various local issues, they start seeing physical location as a non-issue and simply put more pressure on the in-house IT departments to deliver the underlying infrastructure to handle the new demands of a geographically disparate workforce.

If your company has adopted these technologies, tools and policies to allow you to work from home, then be sure to use them to your advantage. Get yourself set up at home, spare yourself the schlep of sitting in the life-shortening traffic and start spending more productive time at home while getting paid for it! How much more can you ask for? Just always remember to check if you’re in your underwear or not before you take that video conference call …

South Africa in general has become extremely dependent on a person’s ID number to achieve simple authentication. In essence not a bad idea, given that the process of issuing a verifiable ID number is firstly secure, trusted, and audited, and secondly that the only issuers of such ID numbers are authorised to do so. Unfortunately these two guidelines aren’t followed, and we live in a country where you can buy a fake ID book for about R200.

The digital landscape for identity management has become increasingly important as well, given the growing dependency on converging technologies as an enabler, specifically for monetary transactions. Of course there has been, and always will be, as much digital activity with regards to identity theft as there exists for more traditional physical identity theft, but it seems as if managing identities digitally is really a much easier task — in principal, of course.

Digital identity management unfortunately requires a lot of infrastructure and change, and given the “Big Brother” paranoia that comes with the technology, you soon realise that the ideal scenario of removing the human factor from the authentication and authorisation process might just remain a pipe dream for the foreseeable future, especially for the masses. Controlling and managing digital identities within an isolated environment, like a big company, is essentially much easier, and although this helps, it hardly affects the bigger picture.

Standardisation and acceptance of identities between the different identity providers is another problem that has been troubling the digital identity-management landscape. Different vendors come up with different mechanisms, standards and strategies, and ultimately people end up with fantastic systems that work really well, but only in specific areas or places. So you end up with multiple digital “identities” that leave you with an even bigger headache to manage the sheer number of things to avoid people acting fraudulently on your behalf — hardly an improvement.

So given the above problems and issues, how exactly do you manage your own identity? Be suspicious and validate why somebody requires your identity-related information, especially over the phone; make sure that your identity documentation is secure and still where you think it is; and realise how much importance that 13-digit number carries in South Africa especially.

Keep an eye on your financial accounts, and report fraudulent activity immediately. In short, don’t trust anybody, and hope that people start focusing on putting the systems and processes in place to curb the corruption that accompanies this very serious aspect of everyday life.

More concretely, a test case that took 190 seconds to execute, now completes in +-450 milliseconds! This calls for celebration, but this also calls for reflection and inspection, and even more so, continuous inspection.

Inevitably you get the question: “So why didn’t you just do it like that in the first place?” The reality is that this system went live with the original design that suited the original requirements, and it worked, and it worked well. In any enterprise things change over time, though, and ultimately you start experiencing scalability issues that far outweighs the amount of hardware you are willing to throw at a system. I’m a stern believer in simplicity, especially in large-scale computer systems, and if a system needs massive hardware to complete its required functionality satisfactorily, then there’s something wrong (unless if you’re doing weather simulations, of course).

Past experiences have taught me that heavily used systems that fulfill very dynamic business requirements are typically bound to a three-year major refactoring/redesign cycle. These “very dynamic business requirements” are the main factors behind most system-related problems and headaches, and have given birth to myriad processes, methodologies, and acronyms to try to deal with them, but the reality is that without these business requirements, we as IT people don’t really have a justification for our salaries, as we ultimately support business and business processes.

So embrace these changes and the headaches that they bring, because ultimately they will present a situation where you can considerably improve an existing process or system, and then you can also feel like a hero for a day — a hero who earned his salary the honest way …